r for the last ten years. Though they had
been at peace for some time now, it had been Saturday in the county town
ten miles down the river as well, and nobody ever knew what a Saturday
might bring forth between his people and them. So he would not risk
riding through that bend by the light of day.

All the long way up spur after spur and along ridge after ridge, all
along the still, tree-crested top of the Big Black, he had been thinking
of the man--the "furriner" whom he had seen at his uncle's cabin in
Lonesome Cove. He was thinking of him still, as he sat there waiting
for darkness to come, and the two vertical little lines in his forehead,
that had hardly relaxed once during his climb, got deeper and deeper,
as his brain puzzled into the problem that was worrying it: who the
stranger was, what his business was over in the Cove and his business
with the Red Fox with whom the boy had seen him talking.

He had heard of the coming of the "furriners" on the Virginia side. He
had seen some of them, he was suspicious of all of them, he disliked
them all--but this man he hated straightway. He hated his boots and his
clothes; the way he sat and talked, as though he owned the earth, and
the lad snorted contemptuously under his breath:

"He called pants 'trousers.'" It was a fearful indictment, and he
snorted again: "Trousers!"

The "furriner" might be a spy or a revenue officer, but deep down in the
boy's heart the suspicion had been working that he had gone over there
to see his little cousin--the girl whom, boy that he was, he had marked,
when she was even more of a child than she was now, for his own. His
people understood it as did her father, and, child though she was,
she, too, understood it. The difference between her and the
"furriner"--difference in age, condition, way of life, education--meant
nothing to him, and as his suspicion deepened, his hands dropped and
gripped his Winchester, and through his gritting teeth came vaguely:

"By God, if he does--if he just does!"

Away down at the lower end of the river's curving sweep, the dirt road
was visible for a hundred yards or more, and even while he was cursing
to himself, a group of horsemen rode into sight. All seemed to be
carrying something across their saddle bows, and as the boy's eyes
caught them, he sank sidewise out of sight and stood upright, peering
through a bush of rhododendron. Something had happened in town that
day--for the horsemen carried Winch